THE LIVES OF KNIVES
A good knife is a mariner’s best friend I reckon. Over the decades my knives have got me out of quite a few sticky situations and the one time I went to sea without one my leg was nearly torn apart. More about those gory details later.
My knife collection has grown over the decades – not counting the ones lying at the bottom of various seas and oceans – and nowadays numbers about a half a dozen or so.
Grandad gave me my first knife, a folding wooden-handled model handed down to him from his father, my great-Grandad. Great-Grandad was a North Sea herring fisherman, chasing the summertime shoals of the ‘silver darlings’ and hand-lining for winter cod. But the wild weather eventually killed him with pneumonia in his early 40s so his five sons and two daughters were left to scratch a living on our moorland croft.
Living on a croft near the coast, they worked both the land and the sea to survive. As
